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Courses vs. content
online offerings from major institutions are not created equal

What is an online course? What is an online education? These questions
are at the heart of recent offerings of free online content from
institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Britain's Open University.

When it was launched in 2002, MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) was
emphatically declared to be a limited online offering. "OCW is not
about online degree programs. It isn't even about online courses for
which students can audit or enroll," wrote Phillip D. Long. It was
intended to be nothing more than "the content that supports an MIT
education."

The understated message in an initiative such as OCW is that an
MIT education is not equivalent to the resources that support the
education, that it consists essentially of the contact with the
professors and the community that develops among the students. And the
scale of that difference is emphasized by the release of the material,
so much so that OCW could be considered to be a marketing ploy by the
University.

Perhaps not, but as OCW materials circle the globe via the
internet, something like an MIT education is being created with them,
often with MIT's stamp of approval. Thus we see UNESCO and the French
University of Egypt signing an agreement to adapt the MIT content for
use in the delivery of a number of courses. Something like an MIT
education can be obtainedâbut like the liturgies of old, the intercession of the scholar is needed to interpret the source materials.

But is the development of an institution and a class, whether online or
in person, necessary in order to translate digital content into
learning? What of the self-study materials that have blanketed the
digital world offering everything from database design to Spanish
lessons?

Enter the Open University, which in 2006 announced the launch
of its own open content initiative. Rather than the mere release of
learning materials, the Open University released complete courses. The
courses contain learning outcomes, links to resources and structured
instructional materials. Everything, it might be said, that a home
learner needs to complete the course.

The MIT model has captured a lot of interest. Now institutions
such as Johns Hopkins and Utah State and numerous others have followed
MIT's path. The model has come, almost, to define online learning. But
prior to MIT's initiative, online learning embodied the full package,
and the offerings online could quite properly be called a course. And
open educational resources meant something like "free courses," as
offered, say, by the University of Washington.

In the world of open access journals, different publishers are
classed by color according to how open their offerings really are.
There is the "gold" model, where content is published in completely
open access journals, and the "green" model, where articles appear in
subscription-based journals, but may also be self-archived on one's own
website. The difference is that while one model, the gold model,
ensures a publication will be freely available, the other model, the
green model, means only that it is possible.

A similar distinction may be made between the models offered by
the Open University and MIT. The Open University offers a "gold" model
for open learning online. The course materials are presented in a fully
online course, from which a learner could obtain an education in that
subject. The MIT model, by contrast, is a "green" model. It makes free
online learning possible. But it is itself not an instance of free
online learning.